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Turn University Recruiting into Strategic Advantage

July 16, 2018

University recruiting—a lot of fun, but a lot of work. Few things match the adrenaline and joy of pitching your company and open roles to eager students, but nothing feels as exhausting as compiling resumes, collating feedback, manually creating profiles on your ATS, or searching students one by one on LinkedIn and reaching out to them (school by school) when new positions are open.

With eightfold.ai, you can upload candidates’ resumes in a few minutes, collect feedback and keep track of them, and immediately reach out to them through automated email campaigns.

In other words, your team can focus on fostering a continuous relationship with students as they grow instead of re-establishing those connections every recruiting cycle. Let’s walk through what university recruiting is like today in more detail and how eightfold.ai can scale your university recruiting team without adding headcount.

The Status Quo

The Recruiter’s Perspective

Let’s start from the recruiter’s perspective. You fly out to campus and receive a resume book a few days in advance. If you’re on top of things, you’ll read the resumes on the plane and mark the interesting resumes, but in reality, you’ll probably mark those resumes the night before (if at all). When you arrive on campus, you’ll set up a booth at a career fair and meet hundreds of students for a few hours with only a few minutes to chat with each of them.

This scene is repeated for info sessions or coffee chats. By the end, you’ll have a stack of resumes, business cards, or a spreadsheet of attendees’ information. One by one, you’ll look up each candidate on LinkedIn and save them to a LinkedIn Project. When the job position finally opens up a few months after the recruiting event, you’ll have to manually reach out to candidates to encourage them to apply.

That is not a great experience and is unfair for you and the students who are taking their time to get to know you and your company.

The Student’s Perspective

The student’s perspective isn’t much better. Students sign up for info sessions either ahead of time (and submit their resume when they RSVP) or sign in right there on an iPad. They’ll wait in line for 30 minutes just to be able to chat for 30 seconds with a hiring manager or a recruiter.

At night, they’ll dress in formal attire to attend a one-hour info session and again wait 30 minutes for a chance to chat with a hiring manager who may or may not remember him/her. They drop their resume but are then told to submit their resume again online when the job position opens up in a few months. As a student, you have no idea why you had to submit your resume three times, but you don’t want to miss out and follow those instructions accordingly.

A Better Way Through eightfold.ai

How can this whole process be improved through eightfold.ai? Let’s use the case of Acme Co. (not their real name), an eightfold.ai customer, who recognized that automating their manual processes opened up their ability to foster relationships with university students at scale.

Mass import your candidates’ resumes

Acme received a few hundred PDF resumes from their visit to a few schools across the East Coast. Instead of looking up each candidate one by one, Acme recruiters uploaded these resumes and tagged them to keep track of who these students are and where they met them.

These resume books can get quite large; we’ve seen resume books with over 800 students’ information. But eightfold.ai’s system is robust enough to handle resume books up to a few thousand students.

Match them to your open positions

Once they’re in eightfold.ai, Acme can immediately assess them by viewing their match score to open positions using eightfold.ai’s unique AI technology.

Even if there are no open roles for students just yet, if they are in the eightfold system, they’ll be matched automatically when those positions do open up.

Reaching out to candidates from a specific school

Once campus recruiting is over, Acme can begin an email campaign to foster a relationship with students from a specific university using the tags they created from the resume book import.

By clicking Campaigns ⇨ New Campaign, the Acme recruiter can quickly create a new campaign welcoming them to the “talent community”—our term for anyone who would like to stay in touch for future roles.

The Acme recruiter can filter down his or her audience by choosing to filter only those with the tag associated with the resume book upload.

On the next screen, the Acme recruiter can quickly edit and format an email, reaching out to those students.

We support the use of variables such as {{firstName}}—these will be filled in with the candidate’s first name, allowing you to send personal emails easily.

Because students’ profiles change so much from year to year, the Acme recruiter wants the latest copy of their resumes to stay in touch. When he or she says that we’ll match them to future positions, theymean it.

Conclusion

It is difficult and resource-intensive to maintain relationships with students throughout the university recruiting process, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Promises about “sending your resume to us for future opportunities” need not be empty. With eightfold.ai, you can keep that promise, make your candidates’ experience stand out from your peers, and keep your pipeline healthy.